One hundred years ago, during a deathly viral outbreak, a woman sought to bring together mothers to collectively mourn the death of their sons in war, to create safer conditions from the virus, and if possible, to have mothers heal the divide across communities in the aftermath of the Civil War. The hope was that mothers could talk to each other because all mothers understand the painful loss of the death of a child. The foundation of mother’s day was loss and love.

And so on this Mother’s Day I ask all of us to collectively mourn the loss of a son who was killed in February, though his death came to light last week. Ahmaud Arbery. Yes, he was the son we all have, even if like me, you don’t even have children. I picture our son leaning over to tie his shoelaces. A scene every parent of a teen and young adult son has witnessed over and over. Tying the shoelaces of his running shoes, maybe talking about the next pair that he wanted, and then sitting up, looking at you and saying he’s going for a run. The door closes behind him.  He gets killed. Our son gets killed because he is Black and you are not safe in your body in this country unless you are a White, straight man.

I read the article about Ahmaud Arbery last week. Actually, I didn’t read the article. I read the headline. A ‘25 year old Black man running in a neighborhood is shot to death, no arrests’ and I put my computer down and spent the next two days crying. I couldn’t bring myself to read the article. The headline was all I could bear because this is such an old, old story.  This brutal death broke my heart and broke through some veil of patience shattering some foggy belief that the long arc was bending toward justice. It’s not.

This was a lynching. A young man goes out running and gets shot because he is Black. A young man goes to the store and is killed because he is Black. A young man walks through a neighborhood and is killed because he is Black. A young man drives home from work and is pulled over in his car by police and is killed because he is Black. The killers of these men are not held accountable. Their cases are dismissed. They are exonerated. Our systems of laws of accountability are broken. But even more than that, our culture of responsibility is broken.

This isn’t the first time I have been outraged about a racist brutal death, but it is the first time I am writing about it. I have spent much of my career writing about trauma and I believe that experiences and stories of trauma belong to the survivors. And racism and the acts and outcomes of White supremacy and genocide are traumatic and writing about acts of racism has always felt dangerously close to usurping someone else’s story, a story that belongs to the people who have endured those particular traumas.  I am a White woman and I don’t tend to write personally about traumas that I have not endured. But I need to write about the racism of this event because this particular week not writing about it, staying silent feels like an act of violence. I don’t mean I was not talking about it—talking it about it with friends and colleagues or voicing outrage at the injustice. But talking about it in my own world is a private conversation. And today, I can feel in my bones that a private conversation for a public evil amounts to silence. And when our son gets killed, we cannot be silent.

And I want to be clear that this isn’t a piece of writing about White guilt, though there is plenty of behavior by White people to be ashamed of, and plenty of my own behaviors and inaction around race to be ashamed of. This is a piece of writing about White responsibility. It is time for the people who consider themselves White, who benefit from being White, to take responsibility for the racism in this country and the resulting violence.

White America has lost the meaning of responsibility. We lean lazily on some legal definition of responsibility –that if we can’t be blamed directly with committing a racist act with proof that would hold up in a court of law, we aren’t personally responsible. It seems that the legal definition of responsibility or fault has replaced a much more common sense moral responsibility—a responsibility to what is just and right. A responsibility to something bigger and at the same time something much more basic. A sense of ownership of the problem--that we all, as White people, every single one of us, have a responsibility to the racism that killed that young man. He belonged to us, as one of our children and we have failed him, as we have so many others. We have a responsibility to this young man and his family even if we didn’t pull the trigger because we go along with a society that allows others to pull the trigger and we don’t hold them accountable.

I have gone along in society because I have often fallen for the great lie that ‘it’s getting better’ because I have believed in what Ta-Nehisi Coates names as the ‘dream.[i]’ The vision of America that Americans who consider themselves White envision. A country that is made up of Memorial Day parades, and picnics and school plays. Baseball games and hot dogs. As a woman I have fallen for the same dream of gender equality and it doesn’t exist either. Every example of ‘progress’ –a Black President, a Black CEO, a woman Supreme Court Justice only makes the dream stronger. The dream is an opiate that allows you to keep living in a deeply unequal and unjust society without feeling the pain of it. And if you don’t feel the pain of it, you don’t take on the hard work of repairing it.

But leaning on legal definitions of responsibility is not going to dismantle and end racism. It has never just been the laws on the books that have held people accountable. Laws are important and crucial to justice because they provide a means to establish minimum behavior. But laws on the books only get upheld because the community wants them to.  In the 70’s there were laws on the books that prohibited assault and battery, but growing up in a household of domestic violence I witnessed that even when the police came, they didn’t treat the violence as a crime.  It was illegal for one adult to hit another. But domestic violence was seen as a private matter and not a matter for criminal proceedings. Laws are upheld when culture and community say “this is wrong.” There was a turning point with domestic violence, and in many places it’s no longer tolerated in the same way it was in the 70’s. The laws did not change. People’s tolerance of violent behavior changed.

Racism and White male supremacy continue because as a culture we let them continue. We tolerate racism in our culture and media as a ‘difference of opinion.’ Racism is not a difference of opinion. Racism is the underpinning of violence and death. There has become an obsession with hearing both sides of something as if they have equal value. There isn’t another side to racism, it is just wrong. But just because it is wrong doesn’t mean we don’t all struggle with it. As the playwright Suzan Lori Parks states, “Racism is a virus and we all have it. So, what do we do with that information[ii]?”  

What I am doing with that information, and I invite you to join me, is sitting as long as I can with the pain of Ahmaud’s death. Letting that pain find the places in me that have fostered indifference or inaction in situations of race. Letting that pain find the places that have ignored where I could have acted differently—said something or not said something. Done something or not done something. Feeling that pain in my heart because in the very fabric of my being I love children and I feel the ache and the shame of behaving in ways that have put the lives of other people’s children at risk. And using that pain, and especially that love to motivate me to keep looking at racism and owning my part in it.

 © 2020 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

[i] Coates, T. (2015). Between the World and Me. NY: Spiegel & Grau. p.11

[ii] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-white-noise-suzan-lori-parks-oskar-eustis-20190417-story.html